The Rain
by cellotlix
Summary: "There are a lot of things in life that I hate, that I really fucking despise, and I make no secret of them. But if there is one thing that scrapes on my skin and raises the hairs on the back of my neck like nails on a chalkboard, it's the rain. I fucking hate the rain." Jack on her childhood on Pragia.


**AN: This was for the Iron Fic challenge on tumblr, with the prompts "Jack' and "water'. I completed this in 50 minutes, and edited for 10. Thanks to Omgmussim, Dandy in the Aspic, thunz, and idrawcubes for this awesome idea!**

There are a lot of things in life that I hate, that I really fucking despise, and I make no secret of them. Why should I? An actual person is different, I guess; they're trained to be polite and bite down on the bile that churns in the back of their throat, the bitter things that long to be free. They're better at swallowing their anger. But I learned long ago that I'm not an actual person; that I am a thing, a powerful thing, and it doesn't matter what I do.

But if it's one thing that I hate, if there is one thing that scrapes on my skin and raises the hairs on the back of my neck like nails on a chalkboard, it's the rain.

I fucking _hate_ the rain.

* * *

_When they bring her in, she's a child. A very young girl, hardly older than an infant. Pretty brown hair, pretty brown eyes. She likes reading with her mother and exploring. She likes chocolate cake and watching for shapes in the clouds. She's normal; a person. But there are no pretty shapes in the clouds on Pragia. There is only the rain, the ever present concussion of storms that lash against the windows._

_The first days, she sobs for her mother. Each time she tries to plead with her captors, they strike her square across the mouth and tell her to shut the hell up. Shut the hell up, shut the hell up. The words blend with the sound of rain beating on the rooftops, ever present. Inescapable._

_She doesn't remember the first drugs they pump through her veins. She remembers the way they made her feel – sick and slow, fetid as rotting sewage. She remembers the burgeoning biotics coiling in her limbs, untested and untrained, but impossible to ignore. She should have felt powerful, maybe, except there is no power for the captives on Pragia. There is no power for the farm animals they prod and poke and fill with hate._

* * *

_She's a little older when she stops looking toward the sky for the sun. She's forgets the way the warmth of it felt on her skin, her mother's laughing voice in her ears. Not for lack of trying! If it was possible, she would have tattooed those happy memories on her heart, etched them deep in her bones so that her captors could look and look, if they wanted, but they'd never find them. _

_She hides under her desk when the storms are especially bad. The rain sounds to her like a thousand tiny knives striking the ground, reaching with long fingers to press in her skin. When they bring her out in the open, she screams herself bloody when the rain slides off her skin. It isn't cleansing, not like a normal person would perhaps feel. It's more potent than the most horrific torture her monstrous captors could devise._

_She had a name, but she forgets that too._

* * *

_It takes her a few years to realize she isn't alone in this sharp place (sharp needles slipping beneath skin, sharp coldness wracking her to her bones, sharp hate that makes it hard to speak). At first she is so desperately grateful not to be the only child that she sobs from the relief of it, the frantic joy. There may not be sun in this wet and hellish hole, but she isn't alone, not anymore. _

_As they're bringing her back to her cell one day, she passes another child; a boy with pale hair and blue eyes. She reaches out to him – suddenly so needful for contact that isn't a slap or a stinging hand, a sharp compound or the vials of agony they pump through her, etched on her very bones. But the boy looks at her as if she is no better than a beast – a monstrous thing, covered in blades and teeth. He recoils into his room._

_And now the beating rain against her window is not only painful, it's openly mocking. It taunts her – the pulse pounding of it against her ears, like pointed laughter. _Who would love you, _it sneers, sliding slowly, derisive tracks on glass. _Who wouldn't fucking despise you the moment they saw you?

_She hides under her desk, clenching her eyes so tightly shut that she sees only darkness instead of the red of her eyelids. She fists her hands over her ears to block out the pounding of the rain, ever-present. Inescapable, driving into her skull like a thousand tiny screws pressed into her temples until the blood flows. _

_But she fails. There is no silence here. There is always the rain. _

* * *

_They start calling her Zero. Subject Zero, technically. She doesn't know it's because they see her as the valuable one, and this whole exercise in grotesquery is for the benefit of making her immensely powerful. _

_She believes they call her Zero because she is nothing. She is an absence, a yawning void. She is a vacancy, a person-shaped hole where a girl once was._

_It's an inappropriate name. She doesn't feel nothing. The taunting, maddening rain has made her insane with rage. She screams at the children on the other side of her cell as they talk and huddle together, taking refuge against the horrors they live. She flails against the walls of her room, beating her hands bloody against the glass, but they never hear her. _

_She is convinced they ignore her. Or maybe they really can't hear her?_

_Maybe she doesn't exist._

* * *

_They bring her out to the courtyard for the fights. The feel of the rain gliding down her skin is a rotting insult – like long-taloned fingers ranking through her flesh. She images the rain exposing the tender places between her ribs, showing her opponent her weaknesses. _

_Zero has no weakness. Zero has nothing. Zero _is _nothing._

_She squares off with the boy from before, the pale haired, blue eyed boy. He's looking at her as if he wishes he could plunge his hand into the breadbasket of her chest and crush her heart in his fist. She laughs at this image, at the look of surprise on his vacant face when he would realize she has no heart._

_She lights the biotics in her flesh so that she is a flame, and she revels in this. If she were normal fire she would be extinguished by the cruel rain, but she is far more than it; she is power itself. She is the fiery heart of a star, the blue-white wick of a candle. She feels . . . she _feels!

_They scrap like dogs snarling over a bone. This is dirty, desperation-fueled aggression of those who want nothing more than to live. This is hard-edged and furious. She can see a ring of white around the boy's eyes as he hurtles toward her, hands outstretched like claws. But she is the heart of a star; she consumes him._

_She comes back to herself when the boy is lying dead in the rain water, his lips dark with blood. _

* * *

_She wonders if she has lost her tenuous grasp on sanity. Her life is steel around her wrists, icy hate curdling in her gut, the drugs they push screaming into her blood. She vacillates between hopelessness so potent she prays for death and rage so acute it could easily consume her as consume those she hates._

_She wonders if any of this is real. _

_And in the solitary places between the treatments and the fights, she pulls out her hair in giant clumps and organizes the strands on her desk, little orderly lines of chocolate brown. She draws her nails over skin and paints the blank places with blood, and it pleases her to see. There is no emptiness here, not on the canvas of her flesh. _

_The rain taunts, but she learns to ignore._

* * *

_She doesn't know how old she is when freedom comes. She doesn't know the day or the hour, only that it rained as always. She only knows that she took it without question, without waiting. She took it viciously. She kills a begging guard and a whimpering child. She rips through a horde of technicians and subjects that block her passage through the facility. _

_She doesn't know how to fly a shuttle – she doesn't know anything that a person would know—but through a combination of stupid luck and pure force of will, she flies it off Pragia. _

_She flies toward the sun, toward the warmth, the absence of rain. She would have flown through the heart of the star if a frigate hadn't come upon her and taken her aboard. And though this is the start of a new hell, she can't find it in herself to be ungrateful. _

_The first time she sets foot on earth that isn't fetid from constant rainfall, she laughs until she can't breathe. She laughs herself stupid._

* * *

When you listen to a voice telling you that you're nothing, you learn to believe it. You learn to _fucking hate_ it. When they cage you like a beast, you start thinking you are one.

When all you see is rain, you forget that there was ever anything else.


End file.
